FAIR is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing well-documented answers to criticisms of the doctrine, practice, and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mountain Meadows Massacre/George A. Smith carried orders
This article is a draft. FairMormon editors are currently editing it. We welcome your suggestions on improving the content.
Questions
==
- Critics wish to make Brigham Young and apostle George A. Smith complicit in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Thus, critics claim that prior to the massacre, George A. Smith is claimed to "have carried orders to Cedar City leaders to incite their people to avenge the blood of the prophets" (Denton, 186).
Source(s) of the criticism
- Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), ???.
- Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, (Secker & Warburg, 2003), 186.
Detailed Analysis
==
One reviewer dismissed the thin evidence upon which this claim rests:
- "This argument assumes Brigham Young had formulated the plan for destruction when the Fancher train was still in Salt Lake City on 5 August 1857. There is no evidence of material provocation by the Fancher train at this early stage except from persons with no reliable basis upon which to provide testimony....Nobody has ever offered any believable evidence that George A. Smith gave instructions to Haight and Lee to massacre the train. John D. Lee is the only person who purported to offer evidence of these instructions," and Lee had a clear motive to lie to save his own skin and make his memoirs more marketable. "Lee's claim that George A. Smith met Lee in southern Utah on 1 September 1857 (an approximate date deduced from Lee's text) with orders of destruction was impossible because Smith was hundreds of miles away in Salt Lake City on that very day, as well as the day before.[1]
Thus, Lee is wrong on those events which we can verify, and no other evidence supports this claim. == Notes ==
- [note] Robert D. Crockett, "A Trial Lawyer Reviews Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets," FARMS Review 15/2 (2003): 199–254. off-site
Further reading
FairMormon Answers articles
FairMormon web site
Videos
| Shining New Light on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Gene A. Sessions , 2003 FAIR Conference |
- Part 1:Shining New Light on the Mountain Meadows Massacre
- Part 2:Shining New Light on the Mountain Meadows Massacre
- Part 3:Shining New Light on the Mountain Meadows Massacre
- Part 4:Shining New Light on the Mountain Meadows Massacre
- Part 5:Shining New Light on the Mountain Meadows Massacre
- Part 6:Shining New Light on the Mountain Meadows Massacre